Our Story

The first company I set up was actually Eco Team and not Experiential Journeys. When I first started setting up mobile camps inside the Udawalawe National Park in 1998, establishing a fully-fledged Eco Adventure company in just 2 years wasn’t the exact plan. Nothing creative was happening at that time in the industry due to the war, and this new concept of a fully-serviced mobile camp in the jungles became a hit. To expand and move to other areas of adventures, and to set up camps in other wildlife locations, Eco Team was established in the year 2000.

My primary objective was to be a service provider to fellow DMCs. I wasn’t aiming to work directly with any FTOs. With a “Sri Lanka’s First” concept, I envisioned the local DMCs to take Eco Team to the world and make Sri Lanka famous in the Eco, Nature and Adventure arena. The strategy was to tap into the niche segments and move away from mass tourism.

With quite a few DMCs it did – we’ve built partnerships with certain DMCs who still prefer us to date. Mutually beneficial alliances have allowed both parties to grow together. However, the majority of the DMCs in Sri Lanka were comfortable with the domains they’ve always operated in and were not willing to take a risk and go for something new. They preferred to just give FTOs what they’ve asked for. Honestly, it was frustrating to be dependent on other DMCs; we’ve met quite a few who didn’t see the bigger picture, mostly because the experiences suggested and adventures designed were alien at the time. It was one of the initial obstacles we faced being “Sri Lanka’s First”.

I separated the two businesses and set up my own specialised DMCs and Brands – a collective interest shared by the company’s stakeholders. There was a gap in the market; many FTOs were not finding what they wanted in a traditional DMC model. And although Eco Team handled certain specialised DMCs directly from inception, we thought the time was right to separate the two businesses. Thus was the birth of Experiential Journeys.

We have a wonderfully diverse and passionate multicultural team from Sri Lanka and overseas. Our key personnel have half a decade of experience in the travel business, and almost all our team members started their tourism careers with our group – we think of them as the essential gears imperative to make all this work. In most cases, if you are trained to be a one-size-fits-all gear (which is how mass tourism runs) you tend to have tunnel vision. The combination of experience from our seniors and unconventional ideas from our juniors worked well with the niche markets we are in to and propelled growth exponentially.

Our team culture is based on our core team values that are brought into the word FAMILY: Focus, Accountability, Milestones, Innovation, Leadership and Youthfulness. We strive to live by it.

We’re a different league; you can’t benchmark the quality of apples with oranges. We don’t play in the same field other DMCs do; if you need a standard, cheap, ‘round tour’ with brochure-based Sri Lankan highlights, we may not be the best option for you. There are hundreds of others who have built concrete bases on that very field. Our game and where we play is different; we serve our clients on the foundation of our 6 core team values plus 4 service values – Focus, Accountability, Milestones, Innovation, Leadership, Youthfulness, Exclusive Experiences, Genuine Encounters, Spaces with Character, and Passionate Sustainability. It’s a game changer.

We design unique and memorable experiential journeys – not tours. Competition that actually steps up to the plate is very few.

Yes. Quite a few of the experiences we’ve created are original, exclusive and rich in culture, where some island natives you meet on our experiential journeys haven’t even interacted with overseas travellers before. There are no scripts or charades, what you get is real. Your opportunity becomes their opportunity as they are able to earn a decent income, whilst simply continuing to go about their day to day activities.

In addition to our own brand of accommodation in the group, we are proud to have inspired many small and medium scale entrepreneurs to create accommodation units of their own, with character and high levels of service, in an effort to be integrated into our experiences.

People tend to see me as a hedonist with a little more than a mere penchant for adventure, but it’s really the other way around. Social and environmental responsibility, sustainable business practices, and a love for conservation for both plant and wildlife isn’t just a corporate ethos or a CSR activity of mine. It’s a calling. A purpose. Immersive and guiltless adventure are simply the spoils.